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Sunday, February 28, 2016

In early January, I wrote about Marie, a subway rider in
the Northeast, who witnessed a seated young woman talking on her cellphone
refuse to move her bags from a seat after a young man asked her to so he could
sit. The young woman pointed to several empty seats on the train.

Marie found the young woman's behavior rude and wondered
if she should have said something. Since the situation got resolved without
much fuss, I told Marie that she had no obligation to intercede, but that the
right thing when riding a subway is to only take up one seat.

Readers from California, Canada, North Carolina, Ohio,
and loads of locales in between immediately took issue and asked me to
reconsider my response.

"It's a shame you didn't encourage her to say
something to the rude subway rider," wrote G.K. "You essentially were
advising her to condone the behavior. If Marie and five other subway riders
would have spoken up and criticized the hogger's behavior, perhaps she would
have been forced to acknowledge her behavior as rude and behaved differently
next time."

But most readers took issue with the suggestion that the
young woman was being rude by placing her bag on an empty seat and telling the
young man to sit elsewhere.

"Are you out of your mind?" asks N.C.
"Plenty of empty seats and a man wants to sit right next to his woman?
Maybe she didn't want to be harassed."

"His behavior sounds totally creepy to me,"
wrote H.D.

E.S. asked that I reconsider in light of "the
reality of gender inequalities, personal safety, personal space, and the lack
of any pragmatic harm in placing personal possessions adjacent to oneself,
space permitting."

While I still believe that Marie did the right thing by
not interceding, and that she had no obligation to call out the young woman if
she believed she was being rude, those readers who suggested that perhaps there
was something "creepy" about a young man avoiding empty seats on and
aiming right for the one with the young woman's bag raised good points.

No one riding on public transportation should be asked to
put herself in an unsafe situation. If the young man was sidling up to the
young woman on the cellphone to flirt with her or to harass her, she had every
reason to hold her ground. Marie doesn't believe that this was the case, but
neither Marie nor I nor anyone else can know how vulnerable the young woman
felt at that moment.

The right thing, of course, is always to avoid potential
harmful situations. If the young woman on the train believed she was doing
this, then she had every right to ask the young man to sit elsewhere.

As soon as the train filled up with passengers and seats
became scarcer, the right thing would be for her to remove her bag from the
seat to allow other passengers to sit, even if that meant they might be sitting
right next to her. Sometimes having to sit next to a stranger on a crowded
train is an inherent risk of public transportation.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Massachusetts had a snowstorm a few weeks back -- an
occurrence that is likely to repeat itself regularly over the next several
weeks. A reader from Massachusetts asks if it is right for an employer to make
employees "take unnecessary risks" by driving to work after the
governor asked residents to stay off the roads.

The reader works for a health care organization where
employees who interact with patients must be in the office to be able to do
their jobs. But the reader doesn't interact with any patients and can easily
log on to her company's server so she can do her job from home.

But when she emailed her boss to let him know she'd be
working from home to avoid being on the roads during the snowstorm, he told her
that that would be unfair to the employees who had to show up to work on site.
She would have to take a vacation day if she didn't come in.

The reader has colleagues with whom she works who
regularly have received dispensation to work from home. "We communicate
easily and as needed," she writes.

Other colleagues who have approached the human resources
department with similar requests to work from home during extreme weather
conditions in the past have had no luck.

"It just boggles my mind that in 2016, I'm working
for a company, with a boss, who doesn't allow us to work at home during extreme
weather conditions," she writes. "They'd rather we risk our lives or
take a day off."

There are a few questions at play here. One is whether
it's OK for a boss to insist on particular employees physically showing up to
work even when the weather is miserable and they don't need to be on site to
get their work done. Unless the reader had an agreement with her boss that she
could occasionally work from home, particularly on snowy days, then the boss is
within his rights to insist that she show up physically to work.

But another question is whether it makes sense for the
boss to be rigid about this requirement, particularly if the state's governor
has asked "non-essential" employees to stay off the roads if
possible. In such situations, it's not unusual for companies to allow
nonessential employees to stay home while others go to work.

That it wouldn't be "fair" to the essential
employees if the nonessential employees worked from home seems a red herring.
What the boss really is saying, and has every right to, is that he wants
everyone to show up to work regardless of the weather. If they don't, then he
doesn't want to credit them for a work day.

The right thing would have been for the employee to get
clear on her ability to work from home when she accepted the job. Is it wise
for the boss to insist on employees who don't need to be on the roads when more
drivers could make road conditions more hazardous, especially when those
employees could still put in a full day's work from home? No, but he has the
right to do so. There are times when bosses get to where they are without
wisdom playing into how they got there.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Earlier this week, I received a tweet from T.P., a reader
who provided a link to a story about a college student who had been caught
renting his dorm room on Airbnb, an online site that allows people to rent
rooms, apartments, houses, and other forms of lodging to others.

T.P.'s question to me accompanying the link was simple
and direct: "ethical or not ethical?"

The student who rented out his dorm room told a Boston Globe reporter that he was taking advantage of his dorm's desirable downtown
location as well as his own desire to "make a little bit of extra
money." (Full disclosure: I used to teach at the student's college.)

Airbnb is one of many popular businesses that have had
wild success on the Internet by participating in the sharing economy -- where
people sell access to goods they own, which others might use. Uber and Lyft are
comparable services where people who own cars charge others for rides they book
online to and from destinations. There a number of services available where
people offer stuff or time or goods or services that they have and others want.

While Airbnb has come under criticism from licensed hotel
operators and Uber from licensed taxicab drivers, each service seems to be
thriving as people use the services to make money by leasing out things they
already own.

The college sophomore saw an opportunity and was
industrious enough to try to capitalize on it. He told The Boston Globe that he
had cleared the rental of his dorm room with others in his suite. He also said
he escorted them in and out of the building when they arrived. (It wasn't
entirely clear where the student was staying himself when he let out his room,
which overlooks a large city park.)

When the college found out about the enterprising
student's efforts, it shut him down and he was to face a disciplinary hearing.

Quickly, a student-led support effort emerged on Twitter
and a petition was started on Change.org. As I'm writing, the petition has 498
supporters, but the Twitter feed, while largely supportive, has some voices
mixed in condemning the student's action.

If the student had owned the room he rented out and he
didn't violate any homeowner's association agreement, he would likely be in the
clear. If the student rented the room from a landlord and had the landlord's
permission, he would also have been in the clear.

But the student did not have the dorm owner's permission
to rent out his room, an action that violates both Airbnb's and the college's
policy.

It's good to applaud creativity and industriousness among
students. Entrepreneurial wherewithal is all the rage on many college campuses.
And with skyrocketing tuitions and fees, who couldn't use some extra money to
offset costs and staggering college loans?

But renting out a dorm room, knowing that doing so
violates the agreement with the college and with the website listing the rental
is dubious both legally and ethically.

When embracing the sharing economy, agreements should be
honored and youthful enthusiasm should never get in the way of doing the right
thing.

Jeffrey Seglin writes "The Right Thing," a syndicated weekly ethics column distributed by Tribune Media. From 2004 to 2010, the column was distributed by The New York Times Syndicate. From 1998 to 2004, he wrote a monthly ethics column of the same name for The Sunday New York Times business section.

He is a senior lecturer of public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He was an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston where he taught writing and ethics from 1999 until 2011.